I am so fucking exhausted with the content marketing on Hacker News. It’s not that it has no value. It’s not that there isn’t a place for ‘developer evangelists’. It’s not about this piece. I’m just sick of it.
I come here for a refuge from manipulation- a place where people can share and debate things on their own merits. Content marketing is a not-so-sly way to insert one’s business interests into these types of conversations I enjoy for the purposes of driving metrics, sales, and series A’s.
I hear that taxation and billing and collection are complex. Try to implement WA State destination based sales tax for digital only goods. Where is the relevant tax district? It doesn’t align with zip codes or congressional districts. Municipalities move and reshape the landscape like rivers do. Is a billing address representative of the location of the purchasing party for tax purposes? We took this to a tax judge in 2014, and their final response was ‘do your best’.
I would love to read a blog post with such a war story- about parsing the tax rate soap API into a relational database that can not slow down a checkout page. About how time zones affect rate calculations. Where rate file updates accidentally modified past transactions and how to model data to prevent that. I don’t want to hear something is hard so you should buy my services. Not here. Not on a call to my cell phone. Not ever.
Business leaders need to determine which complexity they want to their developers to tackle- what is the most valuable for profit growth and risk mitigation. If the audience is business leaders, appeal to them directly, and take it somewhere else. If it’s to appeal to software developers, it shouldn’t be attached to ulterior motives. We see through it and we resent it. To the extent that we have influence over purchasing decisions, I’m likely to punish companies who regularly engage in this behavior.
Content marketing is different than creating useful content as a marketing strategy. I’ll raise Digital Ocean as an example. Their sysadmin content is top notch, and I’m happy to give them business for it out of gratitude. That is my decision. Nobody is trying to convince me of how to invest my or my company’s resources.
We get it. Auth is hard. SMS is hard. Billing is hard. None of it is core to most companies core business. If you really want to make your point, show me some code to prove it. Or spend your content budget on something that helps people. Just don’t think you’re going to win me over with a sales piece on HN. You’re not. I’ve already forgotten your name, and if it does come up I’ll have nothing but a negative memory to recall.
I come here for a refuge from manipulation- a place where people can share and debate things on their own merits. Content marketing is a not-so-sly way to insert one’s business interests into these types of conversations I enjoy for the purposes of driving metrics, sales, and series A’s.
I hear that taxation and billing and collection are complex. Try to implement WA State destination based sales tax for digital only goods. Where is the relevant tax district? It doesn’t align with zip codes or congressional districts. Municipalities move and reshape the landscape like rivers do. Is a billing address representative of the location of the purchasing party for tax purposes? We took this to a tax judge in 2014, and their final response was ‘do your best’.
I would love to read a blog post with such a war story- about parsing the tax rate soap API into a relational database that can not slow down a checkout page. About how time zones affect rate calculations. Where rate file updates accidentally modified past transactions and how to model data to prevent that. I don’t want to hear something is hard so you should buy my services. Not here. Not on a call to my cell phone. Not ever.
Business leaders need to determine which complexity they want to their developers to tackle- what is the most valuable for profit growth and risk mitigation. If the audience is business leaders, appeal to them directly, and take it somewhere else. If it’s to appeal to software developers, it shouldn’t be attached to ulterior motives. We see through it and we resent it. To the extent that we have influence over purchasing decisions, I’m likely to punish companies who regularly engage in this behavior.
Content marketing is different than creating useful content as a marketing strategy. I’ll raise Digital Ocean as an example. Their sysadmin content is top notch, and I’m happy to give them business for it out of gratitude. That is my decision. Nobody is trying to convince me of how to invest my or my company’s resources.
We get it. Auth is hard. SMS is hard. Billing is hard. None of it is core to most companies core business. If you really want to make your point, show me some code to prove it. Or spend your content budget on something that helps people. Just don’t think you’re going to win me over with a sales piece on HN. You’re not. I’ve already forgotten your name, and if it does come up I’ll have nothing but a negative memory to recall.
Sorry not sorry.